Soooo this was meant to be a regular blog post series but apparently the last one I did was in 2019. THREE YEARS AGO. Whoops. But maybe I can get myself to do this again haha. I do love doing mini reviews! And I personally love reading shorter reviews, so I hope some of you do as well. This post will be about my 4 most recent reads, which all happen to be romance reads! Well okay, technically one of them I’d categorize as fantasy, if I had to pick a single genre. But it fits well into the “romance fantasy” genre mix. And one of them is a romance tinged with fantasy. I just can’t get away from fantasy for too long okay?? But anyway, I loved all of these! So let’s get into it.

This post is a slight departure from the usual blog content. I wanted to share some thoughts I have on some of the changes that have happened in my life in the past year or so, and I don’t have anywhere else to put it. So I guess the blog will do haha. I don’t know how long this will get, but here is a TLDR for you if you really don’t feel like reading my ramblings:

• I took an extended and indeterminate leave of absence from my PhD program for mental health reasons
• Over time I realized that my thesis/PhD work was making me unhappy, and decided I didn’t want to continue
• Had a major crisis about this because like wow that’s a big change for me
• Started applying to jobs, and now I’m an esports data analyst

I guess this post also serves as my “general announcement” to everyone that I will no longer be finishing my PhD. Some people know already. But I didn’t really talk about it publicly too much until I could discuss it with my advisor.

When I put it like that, in bullet points, it all seems so straightforward. But of course in the moment and going through it, it was definitely not that simple.

Happy pride month everyone! For this month’s The Happy Place 5 post, we of course had to choose a topic centered on queer books. We chose to highlight our 5 queer favs from the last 5 years! I both love and hate this topic. Love because obviously I love highlighting queer books, and there are so many amazing books to choose from. Hate because THERE ARE SO MANY AMAZING BOOKS TO CHOOSE FROM. It’s painful to only choose one book from each year hahaha. Plus so many of my favs were actually published in the same year. So just know that obviously I have way more favs than just these 5 haha. But now on to my actual picks!!

The second Pondathon has now come to an end! Okay fine, it ended like 3+ weeks ago but I’ve been in a blogging slump. So I’m just now posting my final summary for Pondathon II. Time isn’t real! I can post things whenever I want! Anyway, I had so much fun with this readathon. I read so many amazing books, and had a BLAST creating my garden. Just wait until you see my final garden at the end!!

A few notes:

• All of the Pondathon graphics were created by CW of The Quiet Pond and belong to her!
• Find my intro post about joining Pondathon II here!
• And find all my other Pondathon blog posts here!